We've been encountering an issue with a particular website hosted in iis for which I've not managed to get much information from the event log. I'm a bit out of my league with these low level 'raw' diagnostic tools and I'm not if I'm barking up the wrong tree (in which case please tell me - e.g IIS is just broken) or whether I'm following the correct paths to try and locate the issue.
A process serving application pool 'MyWebsite' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '4372'. The data field contains the error number.
Running with DebugView open I reliably see these lines when I encounter an issue
[5904] 4692 iisutil!ReadMultiStringParameterValueFromAnyService [helpfunc.cxx @ 490]:Inetinfo: Failed reading registry value [5904]
Error(80070002): The system cannot find the file specified.
I therefore tried installing DebugDiag and looking for any exceptions, which create a number of full dumps for me. Once I've analyzed them I've got a report out the other end shown below, but I'm not sure how to further analyse this. It tells me the type and message were NOT_FOUND and suggests contacting Microsoft. While this is 1 route - I'd like to know if there are further things that can be done before considering that approach:
I managed to find the cause of my problem, a StackOverflowException because a local reproduction was possible and it was quite apparent once the debugger was attatched.
I've therefore got to assume, that StackOverflowExceptions are similar to OutOfMemoryExceptions in that it makes IIS unstable and therefore completely unable to complete running (even to the point of providing/logging exception information).